Art, science and love.

To start us off we need a little bit of a geology/geography/earth science first year lesson… it will be quick and painless. A sinkhole is a depression or a …well, hole in the earth due to removal of rocks, bedrock, soil… etc usually by something like percolating water or the lowering of a water table. Sometimes, they just pop up out of no where… Like this one.

Yeah. That sucks. More pictures here.

This particular hole is in Guatemala City and is f’n deep - 330 feet deep causing the known death of 2 teenagers and the evacuation of over 1000 people from the area. By the looks of it, although I can’t actually find this number anywhere, it’s probably about 85 feet wide. But it has been concluded that it’s due to recent heavy rains and a sewage issue.

I tell ya. The earth… it’ll just eat ya up. We highly underestimate the power of the earth… this whole “it’ll never happen to me” thing. …And as Gordo reminds us, the Katrina disaster doesn’t count as “me” in GWB’s eyes, as he is now taking away the homes of those that are homeless due to the disaster that he continues to ignore.

Remember when Bush promised to rebuild New Orleans, and help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? Now the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is evicting an entire trailer park full of people who were made homeless by Katrina. It’s been 18 months. And people are still living in “temporary” housing because so much of New Orleans is still uninhabitable.

Some of the greatest civilizations in the world have fallen because of natural disasters… we’re creating one of the biggest eco-disasters ever - but we still sit back and think “it’ll never happen to us.” …I bet the Maya, Minoans, Anasazi, Cahokia, Angkor Wat and even those that we previously thought were simply pillaged all thought they were indestructible against the earth as well.

It’s disturbing that so many civilizations in history have collapsed due to environmental destruction. No matter how much wealth or power a society has, it is still at the mercy of nature. …Those ancient civilizations that I listed fell because of the environment. Because of over population. Because of resource depletion. Tell me, what are current environmentalists warning us about right now? Oh, but technology will save us right? … Listen, I’m a pretty big computer dork - but I don’t have faith in technology. I especially don’t have faith in technology to save the human race. And how long does it take for us to implement new technologies? So not only do we not have them yet - we haven’t even been able to start implementing them, a process that can take a decade, not to mention that all of our environmental problems are actually unanticipated consequences of the technologies that have already been implemented.

But you know…

Maybe the next technology will be the one that stops fucking up and will miraculously solve all our problems.